'an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, abuse, and violence, which crystallises a lot of my current feelings about the internet through a particularly unpleasant example from it. [...]

What we’re talking about is very young children [..] being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.'

A landlord lists a rental space and potential tenants bid against one another to claim the lease. Tenants’ personal information is available to the landlord. The landlord then makes their final decision by weighing what the best offer is along with which bidder seems like they’d be the best tenant

Forensic archaeologists are combing through the soil in Tuam. Perhaps justice might be better served if forensic accountants were combing through the accounts of the Bon Secours Sisters. They sold healthy babies and let the rest to die.

omgwtfbbq. 1: User reports that their gnome session leaks processes; 2: systemd modifies default session behaviour to kill all processes, including screen/tmux; 3: _everyone_ complains because they break 30 years of UNIX process semantics, then 4: they request that tmux/screen hack their shit to workaround their brokenness. Get fucked, systemd. This is the kind of shit that would finally drive me to BSDland

Principal Findings: A new genus and species of leech from Perú was found feeding from the nasopharynx of humans. Unlike any other leech previously described, this new taxon has but a single jaw with very large teeth. Phylogenetic analyses of nuclear and mitochondrial genes using parsimony and Bayesian inference demonstrate that the new species belongs among a larger, global clade of leeches, all of which feed from the mucosal surfaces of mammals.

Conclusions: This new species, found feeding from the upper respiratory tract of humans in Perú, clarifies an expansion of the family Praobdellidae to include the new species Tyrannobdella rex n. gen. n.sp., along with others in the genera Dinobdella, Myxobdella, Praobdella and Pintobdella. Moreover, the results clarify a single evolutionary origin of a group of leeches that specializes on mucous membranes, thus, posing a distinct threat to human health.

Death by Random Forest: this project is a horrible misapplication of machine learning. Truly appalling, when a false positive means death:

The NSA evaluates the SKYNET program using a subset of 100,000 randomly selected people (identified by their MSIDN/MSI pairs of their mobile phones), and a a known group of seven terrorists. The NSA then trained the learning algorithm by feeding it six of the terrorists and tasking SKYNET to find the seventh. This data provides the percentages for false positives in the slide above.

"First, there are very few 'known terrorists' to use to train and test the model," Ball said. "If they are using the same records to train the model as they are using to test the model, their assessment of the fit is completely bullshit. The usual practice is to hold some of the data out of the training process so that the test includes records the model has never seen before. Without this step, their classification fit assessment is ridiculously optimistic."

The reason is that the 100,000 citizens were selected at random, while the seven terrorists are from a known cluster. Under the random selection of a tiny subset of less than 0.1 percent of the total population, the density of the social graph of the citizens is massively reduced, while the "terrorist" cluster remains strongly interconnected. Scientifically-sound statistical analysis would have required the NSA to mix the terrorists into the population set before random selection of a subset—but this is not practical due to their tiny number.

This may sound like a mere academic problem, but, Ball said, is in fact highly damaging to the quality of the results, and thus ultimately to the accuracy of the classification and assassination of people as "terrorists." A quality evaluation is especially important in this case, as the random forest method is known to overfit its training sets, producing results that are overly optimistic. The NSA's analysis thus does not provide a good indicator of the quality of the method.

'By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches—and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued.'

Because there exists no method known to man, more terribly suited to expose the cosmic meaningless of existence than pairing the words of H.P. Lovecraft with seemingly delightful and charming pictures of adorable kittens.

'Well, even if time() isn't random, your RSA private key is probably pretty random. Do not feed RSA private key information to the random subsystem as entropy. It might be fed to a pluggable random subsystem…. What were they thinking?!'

Stories of this sort will tumble out to the inquiry over the next 18 months, making it plain that the network of “homes” where children’s happiness had relentlessly, deliberately, systematically been destroyed, this archipelago of Catholic evil, had covered the entire island. These things should be kept in mind when next we hear it said that the social ills of today can be explained by reference to loss of faith in the traditional institutions of moral authority. This is the reverse of the truth and an insult to the victims of an unforgiveable sin.

our use of networked computers is daily coloured by fear of infection and corruption, of predators and those who would assume our identity, of viruses and data-sucking catastrophes. What if something dark is able to breach that all-important final firewall, the gap between the central processing unit and the person sitting at the keyboard? What if it already has? That would be ‘a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard’, without a doubt — but the unplumbed space haunted by demons and chaos is the network, not the cosmos. In using the internet to creep ourselves out recreationally, we begin to understand the real ways in which it haunts our fears.

The English bulldog has come to symbolize all that is wrong with the dog fancy and not without good reason; they suffer from almost every possible disease. A 2004 survey by the Kennel Club found that they die at the median age of 6.25 years (n=180). There really is no such thing as a healthy bulldog. The bulldog’s monstrous proportions makes them virtually incapable of mating or birthing without medical intervention.

This is exactly what you do NOT want to read about embedded systems controlling acceleration in your car:

The Camry electronic throttle control system code was found to have 11,000 global variables. Barr described the code as “spaghetti.” Using the Cyclomatic Complexity metric, 67 functions were rated untestable (meaning they scored more than 50). The throttle angle function scored more than 100 (unmaintainable).
Toyota loosely followed the widely adopted MISRA-C coding rules but Barr’s group found 80,000 rule violations. Toyota's own internal standards make use of only 11 MISRA-C rules, and five of those were violated in the actual code. MISRA-C:1998, in effect when the code was originally written, has 93 required and 34 advisory rules. Toyota nailed six of them. Barr also discovered inadequate and untracked peer code reviews and the absence of any bug-tracking system at Toyota.

LIVE - for the first time ever in Ireland, Claudio Simonetti (Goblin) & band will perform the classics of horror movie scores by seminal Italian progressive rock band Goblin, Simonetti himself and possibly one or two curve-balls ! Horror rock maestro Claudio Simonetti will fulfill fans’ dreams and nightmares as the band perform the notably eerie soundtracks from Suspriria, Tenebre, Dawn of the Dead, Creepers, Demons and more! This epic show will also feature an intense A/V screening element featuring the electric scenes from some of these revered classics of horror and giallo.